Following in suit of "The Student Thread" how about everyone list their current or past professions? I know this can be a touchy subject so feel free to be vague or nondescript. I found the responses to "The Student Thread" were quite interesting and somewhat contrary to my opinion of who may be lurking on a stoner music forum.

I am a full time student but I have been working as a co-opportunity engineer/junior engineer at a small medical device startup for a couple of years. We develop neurovascular stents.

I once had a small countertop manufacturing/installation business in which I worked my ass off for very little gain, until it literally went defunct. At the time, I had no idea what was going to happen next, and my degree (BA in Business Administration) was almost worthless. My aunt worked for an oil and gas company, and was able to get me on with them for a huge project that they had going in Arkansas...I was only guaranteed six months, and it lasted six years. Upon taking that job, my income quadrupled almost immediately, and I'm still working for the same company in OKC, my hometown...and I get to work from home. Needless to say, it was a giant stroke of luck that completely changed my life, and I feel incredibly lucky to this day. I don't work any harder now than I did then (although I do work hard), but it totally changed my life...by mere happenstance. Tell that to your Republican friends when they talk about 'everyone can make it with hard work'...sometimes, it's pure luck.

/end of story

I work in television so naturally I'm unemployed.

How do you mean? The industry is tumultuous or your particular occupation is transient?


To black aspirin's point: the only reason I've had any sort of success/employment has been because of relationships I made working retail/service as a bicycle mechanic. Every chance I had I informed people of my schooling and actively sought conversations with engineers.

I worked for musician's friend when they first started, and left just before the GC buyout/merger...I moved on to logistics management and then project management for a high-end audio cable manufacturer...next stop was retail management, which was weird and fun and awful all at the same time...now I work in estimating for a commercial printing company.

In between all that I keep taking classes here and there...probably have enough credits for a degree, but unfortunately I do college more like a shotgun than sniper rifle.

Oh, and I also have a side job playing guitar. Shit pay but some nice perqs.

I fix toilets and stuff.

A lot of people have seen my butt crack.

Yes.






I dunno, I'm jumping back in the game in July with the ESPYs again (at least this year they're putting me in writers room), I've just been a deadbeat for too long that I feel all useless and shit.

I tried my hand at academia and realized that it was not for me. All along, I've been working in academic libraries in one capacity or another. Most recent was a part-time gig as a cataloger of East Asian materials. I will probably do a Masters degree in library or information science and go into the meta-data field. My hope is to pick up some programming skills so I can design and implement research resources for scholars of East Asia. For the short term, I will be teaching English at a private high school in southeastern China this coming academic year.

Logistics Fucko for a major heavy equipment mfg'er

I'm a male nurse in a psychiatric clinic, studying to get a Bachelor's degree in nursing and then eventually Master's and Doctoral degree in mental health.

...and yeah, I have a side job of playing a guitar in a band, but this of course doesn't bring any profit, only tons of emotional satisfaction. :)

I work at a crisis shelter for runaway and homeless kids 7 - 17. We also get kids who have some major shit going on at home, whether they are the cause or the victim, and need a few days (or the family does) for everybody to cool off. It's a pretty awesome job, the other staff are great, and I get to hang out with some pretty interesting and cool kids.

Funny story: one of my co-workers was doing an intake, and we search all the kid's stuff as part of it, to make sure they don't have any drugs, weapons, etc. So she unscrews the top of his metal thermos and it goes "PSSSSSST!" and sprays something on her face and hands. Something brown and stinky. Yep, it's shit. Apparently kids are pooping, storing it to let it ferment, and then huffing the fumes to get high. Seriously. They call it "jankum".

My favorite job ever was managing a treehouse hostel in southern Georgia. Just hanging out in the woods, cooking food, placing guests, building new treehouses, tending gardens and chickens. Swimming in the lake naked with lots of girls.

I also worked for the artist Alex Grey as general manager of their new art retreat center they were opening in upstate New York a few years back. Helped them get it up and running. Very sweet and kind man, very deep.

I was a support director and sales engineer for a tiny software company that sold a database product for IT departments at fortune 100 companies for 20 years. I got to see the world and do some fancy stuff. It was very hard and I had to do some tricky maneuvering to keep my job through 3 different presidents and some VC money - customers adored me but coworkers not so much. That company fizzled out slowly so i was able to do a lot of studying on the clock (i worked at home but traveled somewhere twice a week) and I quit in 09 after I got out of grad school. It got sold at a loss and I wouldn't have survived the sale so I was glad I left when I did.


I joined the family business we own, my wife has taken over as CEO from her mother who is stepping aside, but still running a side business. I do operations for all the odd ball lawyering, tax, insurance and legal things and HR and much of finance. We're moving me to CIO soon - it's a highly regulated industry so that's the main annoyance. It's grown to a huge operation in the last two years, but we don't get any money ;(. Just power ;). We employ a mountain of weird people that make me nuts.

Union plumber.

Good money, good hours.

Taught inner city 4th grade, a white collar corporate job after, followed by sushi chef, now back in school going for a Masters.

Cool current job. I also with adolescents, as well as addicts and PTSP patients at the clinic. I also passed a basic course in group psychotherapy, which is the basis of the work with those kinds of patients.

Currently I design retail packaging for obese consumers, before that I lived in Curacao(Dutch slave island) and designed web sites for online casinos & sportsbooks, before the internet I designed presentations on kiosks, CD's and even floppy's. After 911 I took off 6 months and worked on a horse and cattle farm and that was the best job I have ever had...

rock & roll pays very little....

Currently, I work on web applications/sites, basically all disciplines therein (design, development, engineering). I work solo, which is more a result of happenstance than preference. My current gig is at an entertainment company. I develop one main application, along with their web sites (and maintain their IT, which is a minor but hellish nuisance). I do plenty of freelancing too.

Prior, I was Editor < Publisher's Assistant < Intern at the Aquarian Weekly in New Jersey over the course of five years. Leading into that, I worked for a few years at Guitar Center making sure people didn't smuggle Les Pauls out the front door while majoring in "hanging out at the radio station" in college.

I'm currently working in sales operations/administration for a pretty big video game company. It's nothing like the movie Grandma's Boy would lead you to believe, as this is probably the lamest space I've ever worked in. However, my position does afford me the benefits of getting to see a lot of the different aspects of the business, from finance reporting to logistics to production to dealing directly with customers. I get bored easily with repetitious work, so it's nice to always have a new project to work on. My boss seems to have a lot of faith in me too, so I'm gonna stick it out for a bit and see where it goes.

Previously, I was the distribution manager for a large independent record label that has since gone under. That was fun job. Lots of work for sure, but at the same time everyday was a party. Didn't pay nearly as good as my current gig though. I've also had jobs as a nightclub door man (free booze!), member of a professional ship mooring crew (tying up and letting go massive oil & chemical tankers in the cesspits of NJ/NY), help at a local pet store, and as the shooting sports director at a camp for inner city youth.

One of my greatest friends works for a VERY large video game company. Talking to him he seems to enjoy it, but there are weeks/months where he is a bit irritable due to work (he's on the customer service side of things). An associate of mine works for the same company, though he is very deep in the development process. Every now and then he would disappear off the face of the earth. His wife said they burned people out at that place and work was unbelievably stressful there (due dates etc). Turned me away from the video game industry.

Admin/accounting/HR/IT for a small investment company with focus on Vietnam. I also run a foundation that's related to the company which supports orphaned and handicapped children in the regions we invest in.

Yeah, the employees on the development side can get beat down pretty bad sometimes. My company owns several studios, but we do the publishing part of the equation, so we don't get it as bad. One of the bigger studios we have has an office in our building & I know a few people that work/worked directly for them. A very successful title we had a year ago was being worked on right up until the very last minute. 18 to 20 hour days were not only uncommon, but expected from the studio heads. Plus, this went on for a couple months & happens for almost all new releases. Fuck that. I work late when we have new releases shipping out, but it's never that bad. If I was gonna put in that much time at work, it wouldn't be to make some fucking shareholder rich.

Graduated in 1995 with a BA in English. Was a supervisor at FAO Schwarz at the time (worked full time through college), but that didn't seem an appropriate way of applying the education my parents paid for, so I got a job in the customer service department of a local mutual fund company, editing form letters and researching complaints and what have you. Did well at that and scurried up the corporate ladder to management.

Decided I had had enough of customer service and managing people so I transferred over to Marketing, roughly two months before a massive department shake-up. After a demoralizing year, suffering under a vicious cunt of a manager and wondering if I was going to get shit canned before being fully vested (or just quit in disgust), I got "laterally demoted" to a QC department. First year was a good'un, as I had a kick ass boss and it was good to be doing something that wasn't enveloped with shitty, shifty office politics. Second year I finally put that degree to use, when I got hired to write reviews of albums, interview bands, and other editorial hoo-hah for StonerRock.com. It was a good distraction, as one year of QC work was about all I could take (very assembly-line and boring).

After the third, insufferable year, I escaped to IT, where I currently am. Do a combination of layout and database work, automating marketing material and whatnot. It's slightly more exciting than it reads, if only because it involves an even mix of left brain/right brain thinking. The corporate process sucks an unsightly amount of balls, and they're doing as much as they can to stifle innovation from within in typical corporate fashion. Because I work for a corporation, duh. But it pays the mortgage and I'm so spectacular at my job (no, really) that they cut me a lot of slack and put up with me being weird.

Quit the writing gig a couple of years ago, as work, fatherhood, and general malaise about writing about bands that sound like Kyuss proved too much to bear. I'm sure you were all torn up about that too.




I think I got paid more writing than you did rocking.

This one time I worked for some money and stuff.

Finished university with degrees in Political Science and American Literature in 94, went through two years of journalism school and have been working for magazines (TV, computer and consumer electronics) ever since.
My current magazine will be outsourced next month and I will be in talks with our management around that time. Thanks to the liberal German employment laws I will stay in my job at least until next summer, probably doing nothing. And depending on my negotiation skills I will get a good to very good settlement on top of it, since I've been with the company for over 15 years (not counting freelancing).
Don't know if stay in journalism, print is dead and online doesn't pay very well. I'll have to see.